Odi et Amo
by Midwinter Monday
Summary: Who can trace the fine, fine line between love and hate? No time for that now though. The Mortal Cup—and his faithless wife—may still elude him, but he has other means at his disposal now, and Heaven's work cannot wait. Nor does he understand yet how tightly the ties of the heart bind across the years, like cords of steel. Valentine, in the days and hours before City of Bones.
1. Prologue

**A/N: **The first in a cycle of stories about Valentine and Jocelyn. Someday they'll be chapters of one long fic, but for now I'm posting them separately as I go along — they don't seem to be getting written in order!

Canon: My fics take the original _City of Bones_ trilogy as canon. (For more about why I haven't read the later MI books, see my profile).

As always, everything in this fic belongs to the incomparable Cassandra Clare: characters, story and universe, of course, but also tone and language and imagery, which I've borrowed shamelessly to try to get closer to the feel of her story. To the extent that I've succeeded, the credit is entirely hers.

The glancing homage to Voldemort in the third chapter is deliberate.

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><p>.<p>

_For Darth Ouisa  
><em>_who knows what evil overlords have for breakfast_

_._

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><p><strong>Odi et Amo<br>**by Midwinter Monday

.

_Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requieris?  
>Nescio sed fieri sentio et excrucior.<em>

_I love and hate. Why do I do it, perhaps you ask?  
>I have no idea; but I feel it happening — and am in torment.<em>

_Catullus 85_

.

Prologue

_Blackness, vast and absolute: pressing down deep as snowdrifts on the bare peaks and knife-edged valleys lying silent beneath the moonless sky. Nothing stirs; the only sound is the hiss of the night wind, which has lost none of its biting edge even in high summer, and the distant, bitter jangling of the river hundreds of feet below. The torches flare wildly in the wind, throwing monstrous, rippling masks of dark and light onto the sharp features of the man who faces him across the strange sign scratched in the dust between them — not the expected pentagram, nor any other symbol or glyph he has encountered in a lifetime of encyclopedic study. On this lightless and barren mountainside, it almost seems a living thing, its jagged lines stirring dimly with a weird grey light._

_A harsh smile flashes like a blade in the dark and is gone. "Kjo është bërë — It is done." Beneath his lank hair, the Illyrian's face is expressionless, though the hard, bright eyes are fixed on him with a vixen's watchful gaze. A face to watch in turn, and to mistrust — but enlightened self-interest is the strongest guarantee of all. For the gold he covets, the warlock will take care to deliver what he has promised. _

_That the Illyrian can do what he has undertaken, there is no doubt. The esoteric knowledge preserved in this remote mountain fastness, handed down the generations from father to son, stretches back to the days of Jonathan Shadowhunter. _

_"__Leave me now. I can get back down without help." His command of the language is still rudimentary, but it is sufficient to make himself understood. _

_The warlock's feral gaze narrows, eyeing the bag of sovereigns which has been weighing down the left pocket of his coat since they began their arduous ascent. Without warning, a short, wicked-looking dagger appears in his sinewy hand, the breath hissing between his broken teeth._

_If he intended to utter a threat, it never reaches his lips. With a swift, almost bored motion, the Shadowhunter plucks a knife from its sheath at his wrist and throws; the warlock crumples to the dirt without a sound, blood pouring in a dark fountain from his throat. Bending impassively to retrieve the clotted blade, he pauses for a moment, considering, before wiping it clean on the rough cloth of the dead man's sleeve. Better to use his own blood as he had planned: it can only increase the potency of the rune. _

_The wind is picking up; he has no desire to waste any more time out on this dreary ridge. Laying the razor-sharp tip of the knife against his wrist, he opens a vein with clinical exactitude. Blood wells up silently around the cold steel; he watches as it runs down the gleaming blade until the surface is dark to the hilt. Shifting the knife to the other hand, he reaches for his stele and scrawls an iratze mechanically above his bloody wrist, but his eyes are already fixed consideringly on the glyph shimmering in the dirt beyond the dead warlock's corpse. _

_As if fanned by his gaze, the rune seems to flare brighter, spreading a pool of cold white light wider and wider until it is lapping at the soles of his boots. In that instant, the torch wedged into the rock face behind him gutters and goes out. _

_Despite himself, he feels the hair rise on the back of his arms, but he walks forwards not backwards, and the hand holding the knife is perfectly steady. Raising the blade in salute, he approaches the shining rune slowly and it almost seems to his tightly-wound senses that the unearthly light dips and curtseys in acknowledgement as he comes. _

_Stretching out his arm, he raises the knife above the glimmering lines, bars of light and shadow dancing along the dark cloth of his sleeve. For an instant he hesitates, blade poised, and then driving it down into the earth, drags the bloody steel through the middle of the rune in a long, deep gash. As the blade passes, the glowing lines dim and go dark, before leaping up into blood-red flames which writhe and dance in the black night nearly to the height of his knees._

_Demon fire. Scarlet as heart's blood, glowing like the mouth of hell; nothing earthly burns with a bloody fire like that. Although he is barely a foot from the flames, he can feel no heat coming off the blazing lines; but he doesn't expect to. The fire itself, he knows, is hot enough to vaporize stone. _

_The crystalline stuff of the demon towers is another matter. His stele is in his hand; with the smallest of pauses he reaches out and thrusts the end into the jewel-bright, bloody flames. Instantly, the tip begins to glow — not the red ember-glow of the stele, but a blinding white light like the arc of an acetylene torch which sears his eyes and lights up the dark mountainside to electrifying day. _

_He turns his head hastily, glaring after-images detonating behind his closed eyelids, and draws the stele back from the fire. The wind has got up again, but the low sound that quivers at the edge of his hearing now is something else: a deep, dissonant almost-note, like the sound made by a pair of piano strings slipped infinitesimally out of unison. He can feel it too, a faint jarring vibration ___like a low-voltage current _running up his arm from the stele in his fist. _

_Cautiously opening his eyes a fraction, he gazes down through slitted lids at his tingling hand. Out of the flames, it is just possible to look at the dazzling stele through half-closed lashes. There is a kind of harsh and terrible beauty about it, he thinks, blazing diamond-bright against the dark night with this hard, clear, ferocious brilliance. If hatred had a colour, surely it would be this: the pure, bright hatred of goodness for evil, the sharp, instinctive loathing felt by all things of this world for the black foulness battening on it. _

_The cold, terrible splendour of the refiner's fire.  
><em>

_Get on with it, then._

_Setting his teeth, he brings the stele down onto the flesh of his bared forearm. Agony explodes blindingly up his arm, starbursts of icy white fire pinwheeling through the nerves of his clenched hand. _

_Slamming his mind shut against the pain, he tightens his grip on the stele and begins to draw._

_._


	2. (Prologue: Coda)

**A/N:** Can a prologue have a epilogue? Seems absurd — but nonetheless that's what seems to have happened in some wayward corner of my imagination...

As with all my postscripts, this one is pure guesswork: a stab at peeking round the corner to see what's happening after the lights have gone up and the storyteller has gone home. But there is a fighting chance that it is true...

Next proper chapter coming soon, I promise.

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><p>.<p>

Prologue (Coda)

_He's barricaded inside his mind, resolutely beating back the pain that is battering unrelentingly against the walls of his endurance. The rune is fiendishly complex, but he has studied it well, and the lines flow from his stele like molten silver without pause or hesitation. But as he completes the final stroke to close the ring of fire circling his right arm, a surge of such obliterating agony breaks over him that even his iron mental discipline goes down before the white-heat of its fury, smashed to splinters, swept away in the surging tide of unendurable pain. His vision goes white and he hears himself scream, the stele falling from his hand — the whole world is white, consumed with blinding fire, burning up to pure, blank, unbearable nothingness like the day of Judgement... _

_When he comes to, it is to blessed darkness, the empty mountainside black and silent as it began. Suppressing a groan, he pulls himself up onto one elbow and peers into the night. Of the terrible shining rune, there is no trace. The dust is smooth and bare; glimmering lines and blood-red flames have all vanished like smoke drifting on the night wind. There is only the faint, heavy scent that lingers darkly in the air, a flat, metallic odour like a mixture of ashes and old bronze — and branded deep into his flesh, this strange steel-blue Mark which throbs with a savage, fiery ache that threatens for a moment to push him back into deeper blackness. _

_But it will do what he needs it to do. His task here is done. And he knows how to live with this sort of pain. Getting carefully to his feet, he casts a last glance around the bare mountaintop, which he devoutly hopes never to look on again, and then, without a backwards glance, begins his arduous descent to the world of living things whose safety rests with him._

_._


	3. Paris

.

Paris

Mundane news was inevitably inane, but in August it seemed to reach new heights of fatuousness. Folding the morning papers with an irritated gesture, the man the Clave took for dead twice-over set them impatiently aside on the breakfast table before stretching out a well-manicured hand to lay another slice of _saumon fumé_ on his buttered toast.

After ten months of self-imposed exile in the wilder parts of Albania, the small amenities of civilized living were undeniably a pleasure. Shadowhunters had no need of the comforts that mundanes clung to. You ignored cold, wet and hunger, and met pain and exhaustion with easy contempt. But that didn't mean you couldn't appreciate the finer things in life. It was simply a matter of priorities.

And the dark fruits of his Balkan researches would be worth the trifling inconveniences of that rugged landscape a thousand times over. Pushing back the silk sleeve of his dressing gown, Valentine Morgenstern gazed with grim satisfaction at the gleaming blue-black Mark that circled exotically around his forearm like Damascus steel, throbbing unpleasantly.

It had hurt a good deal more at the beginning. But Nephilim were born to pain. You bowed to the will of Heaven and did what you had to, with no thought for the cost. If only the Clave grasped this simple, unassailable truth, he thought with a flash of anger, none of what he was doing now would be necessary. But the Clave was as soft and lazy and feckless as ever — while the hosts of hell grew stronger with every wasted year. One day soon, the tipping point would slip by unnoticed. And then all the belated heroism in the world would not be enough to hold back the demon hordes pouring across the face of the earth until they had reduced it to dust and cinders.

As though in dark harmony with the thought, the black fire braceleting his flesh burnt for a moment fiercer still. Breathing hard, he leaned his head against the back of the chair, forcing back the savage pain until he had made it as nothing again.

_Valentine. _The musical voice in his head spoke softly, urgently, familiar as breathing. _There has to be some limit to the things you can reasonably ask of yourself — of anyone. _The voice rang with distress; but it held a note of loving resignation too, as if she had no real expectation that he would attend to her remonstrations any more than he ever had where this subject was concerned.

_Jocelyn, we've been over this_. The words breathed out soundlessly, somewhere between a thought and a sigh of exasperation. Reason had no place in this, nor should it. Brave and intuitive and fearless as she was, she had never really grasped the implications of the battle the Nephilim were fighting. Year after year, demonic incursions went on rising relentlessly. In the face of this threat, the notion of reasonable limits was preposterous, a travesty. There was nothing — _nothing_ — he would not do, to safeguard this fragile world from the holocaust that threatened to engulf it.

With a frown, he gazed unseeing down at the snowy linen spread over the breakfast table. Fifteen precious years had been lost through his folly. But he would make up for lost time now — even if the Cup continued damnably to elude him. Armed now with this rune, he could call on the power of the Infernal Realms, and bend it to his purposes. With their assistance he would re-forge the Nephilim into a weapon that hadn't been seen since the days of Jonathan Shadowhunter.

And then he would turn it on the demon invaders, and drive them from the world forever.

Letting his sleeve fall, he pushed all thoughts of his wayward, stubborn, faithless wife firmly aside, and returned to the contemplation of his plans. There were certain schemes he'd been revolving in his mind before he'd allowed the idiot antics of the French press to distract him...

He was just stretching out a hand to pour out a second cup of Mme Bizalion's excellent coffee when he heard, or perhaps felt it: a faint rattling like a loose-fitting latch that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. He paused a moment, bone-china coffeepot suspended above his cup, before resuming pouring with a faint noise of irritation. Blackwell, almost certainly, with the latest unnecessary progress report on the refurbishments at Renwick's.

It had probably been a mistake to allow himself be persuaded to embrace this scheme. Of the great world cities, New York would not be his first choice as a base for his Circle Resurgent. Setting the coffee pot down, he cast a regretful glance around the pale, panelled elegance of the Hôtel Bizalion's _appartements meublés._ The Parisian morning light picked out the fine plasterwork and discreetly elegant furnishings, gleaming on gilt and walnut and marble and reminding him exactly why he preferred the Old World to the New.

But with a little trouble one could make oneself comfortable anywhere. And the bones of Renwick's were good; a little money and taste could work wonders there. He hoped Blackwell wasn't making a pig's ear of his instructions.

From an operational point of view, the sanatorium was undoubtedly superb, which was of course what actually mattered. The discovery of a working Portal intact beneath a tangle of fallen beams was a stroke of fortune beyond his wildest imagining, and had naturally decided the matter. Fixed Portals were vanishingly rare, their usefulness practically limitless. Angel only knew how it had survived when the roof fell in.

Leaning back, he raked an abstracted hand through his hair. Nowadays, he was proof against the folly of optimism: you assessed the variables dispassionately, taking cold-eyed measure of the obstacles arrayed against you — and without a doubt they were formidable. All the same, it was difficult not to see it as a sign. After all, Heaven was ranged on his side.

_Sub hoc signo,_ indeed, he thought with a thin smile. Perhaps he should have the motto picked out in the stonework.

To be fair, had to admit that New York, in all its gritty ugliness, had certain indisputable advantages. Anyone looking for demons — to kill or to enslave — would be hard-put to find better hunting grounds.

And the filth and degradation that drew demons to the city in such numbers could serve his own purposes as well. Meditatively, he buttered himself another piece of toast, gaze narrowing thoughtfully. If the Infernal Worlds found easy pickings among the scum and refuse of humanity that washed up on New York's streets, well so would he. His plans, after all, were maturing rapidly.

There was Jonathan to be thought of too: Jonathan, who would be of age in little over a year — sooner, by the Clave's reckoning. It was time he took a closer interest in his progress. It would be entertaining too to see how Maryse and Robert were getting on — and poor Hodge. Setting down his coffee cup, he leaned back in his chair, a trace of amused anticipation pulling at the corners of his mouth. Yes, a sojourn in New York could definitely be rewarding.

The rattling noise, which had been continuing at intervals, resumed with a new violence and urgency, as though some unseen door were being savagely shaken off its hinges. With a stifled grimace of annoyance, he rose and went over to the french doors that opened onto the decorative balcony overlooking the Rue de Rivoli.

There was no one there, of course, nor could there have been: the balcony was purely ornamental, a flourish of wrought-iron scrollwork above a sill too narrow for anyone to stand on. Drawing his stele from his dressing-gown pocket, he scribbled rapidly on one of the windowpanes and waited.

The sweeping view of the Tuileries faded to blankness as the wards wavered and thinned, and in its place Blackwell's thickset outline slowly condensed in the glass, like a reflection in the bathroom mirror appearing as the steam recedes. He looked jaded: his shirt crumpled, lines of fatigue sharpening the blotchy outlines of his face. His expression was annoyed.

Valentine smiled. "Good morning, Cornelius. Or should I say: good evening?" He could see his own reflection in the glass superimposed on Blackwell's disgruntled bulk, well-rested, breakfasted and immaculate in dove-grey brocaded silk. Half a world away, the man on the far side of the glass drew a bad-tempered breath.

Raising his eyebrows, Valentine held up a deprecating hand and forestalled him gently. "It was you who wished to speak with me, Cornelius."

His tone was mild, but the other man must have heard the warning in his voice because he subsided with a kind of visible growl like a large, truculent dog: thwarted but obedient.

"I'm sorry if the late hour is inconvenient." Valentine's gaze travelled with faint amusement over the Shadowhunter's dishevelled figure, noting the empty glass of scotch on the inlaid sideboard by his elbow — the consignment of furniture from Sotheby's had evidently arrived as scheduled — and the smouldering remains of one of his deplorable cigars. "I'm afraid my powers don't at present extend to eliminating the time difference between Paris and New York."

A scowl creased Blackwell's suffused face. "I tried looking for you earlier. In the evening. _Your_ evening. You were out.

"Naturally I was out. I'm a busy man." He glanced at his watch. "I can give you five minutes. I take it you have something of importance to report?" The wallpaperers, he saw, glancing past the glowering Shadowhunter into the dim room beyond, had completed their work in good time. Taking no chances on failing to deliver as promised, he supposed, which was wise of them. In the rosy torchlight, the walls glimmered a stately crimson and gold: a trifle ponderous, perhaps, but it suited the monumental stonework of the Gothic Revival sanatorium.

"Not to report exactly." Blackwell hesitated, bloodshot eyes sliding sideways, though the set of his shoulders was still visibly resentful. "I wanted to confirm your instructions before work starts on the north wing. Rebuilding the roof turned out to be more difficult than we anticipated, and we're looking at some serious cost overruns, even allowing for the goblin workmen you called in. Obviously the south wing had to be done on account of the Portal, but I thought — I wondered if —" His thick voice trailed off belligerently.

"_We_ anticipated?" Valentine allowed the pronoun to dangle unpleasantly in the air. "I might remind you that the idea of using this property was yours, not mine, Cornelius, and I have left the business of superintending of its restoration to you. A task I would not have thought beyond your powers."

Pangborn, he reflected, would have had the sense to apologize. Blackwell paled, but it was obvious he was about to launch into blustering excuse. Valentine eyed him like he was some kind of beetle he'd found crawling in the scullery, and cut him off coolly.

"Enough, Cornelius. In future, you will take care to furnish me with an accurate assessment of costs and potential difficulties. For now, the renovations will proceed as planned. My pockets are deep enough; and I don't fancy operating out of a ruin. Are those Ifrit plasterers finished on the first floor? Well tell them to get a move on; they've been at it for days, and the rest of the furnishings from Morlock are arriving at the end of the week. And you'd better remind the armourer that I expect those maces by Thursday."

This time Blackwell only nodded, his jaw tight. The sullen look on his face, thought Valentine with irritation, was probably the closest he got to looking chastened. He was aware of a pang of regret as he gazed at the thuggish figure in the window: so many of his best lieutenants had been lost — or lost to him. But you worked with the tools you had. In time he would have more and better ones again; they would flock to his banner.

Of course it had been the best ones — the bitterness burned like aloes on his tongue, even after all these years — who had deserted and betrayed him. All except poor Stephen. But he had preserved the best of Stephen, by Heaven's grace, and taken it for his own.

"I must go." Pausing by the table, he reached down to collect the jewelled brooch that lay beside his plate, its chased silver winking in the sun. "I have an appointment in the Rue St. Honoré in three quarters of an hour, and I don't propose to go out like this—" he glanced down dryly at the brocaded silk of his dressing gown.

"Give Maurice my greetings and tell him I'm looking into his suggestion about young Verlac. Oh, and you might have the armourer add a half-dozen lengths of silver chain to the order of iron chains he's delivering today — no, better make that a dozen each of electrum and silver."

With a nod of dismissal, he pocketed the amulet and turned towards the door. He imagined his errand would prove as fruitless as all the rest; over the years he'd pursued so many false leads he'd lost count. The medallion could easily have come into the dealer's hands at three or four removes; there was no reason to suppose the young woman his assistant remembered was Jocelyn. In truth, he acknowledged wryly, she wasn't really a young woman any more — though he supposed an elderly Parisian shop assistant might conceivably still describe her in those terms.

But he couldn't shake off the feeling that this time he was close; that the luck which had brought him the unlooked-for gift of a Portal was still running strongly in his direction. He had dreamt about her last night for the first time in years, her face as vivid as firelight in the flaming calyx of her hair.

"Gemstones for a lady-friend?" Blackwell's unpleasant voice broke in on his reflections. Controlling the impulse to give this idiocy the savage answer it deserved, "Making enquiries," he said briefly. Even thugs like Blackwell repaid a degree of finesse in handling, unfortunately. Turning back towards the window, he allowed a dark smile to spread across his features. "I have hopes yet of laying my hands on the Mortal Cup,"

The other man's glance sharpened shrewdly. "One of your family trinkets, then, I take it? You think you can trace it back to the bitch?"

"Possibly." His voice was curt. It was not a subject he intended to discuss, not, at any rate, until there was a good deal more concrete _to_ discuss. First he had to find her. Once he had seen her — well, after that, he would know whether it was any of these fools' business, or not.

But how strange — improbable — if after so many years of inaction, of fruitless searching and careful, laborious rebuilding, events should — seemingly — all suddenly be moving at once. He found that he could picture Jocelyn in Paris surprisingly easily: one of the quainter parts of the Quartier Latin, he imagined. She had always been absurdly fond of the crooked stone streets around her parents' house in Alicante, though she'd settled happily enough on her family estate with him when they were married.

That she would be painting, he had no doubts. For an instant, his lips curled sardonically at the image of his Shadowhunter wife standing like Degas or Renoir before her easel in some garret on the Left Bank. His wife, who thought she could escape from him by sinking without a trace into the world of the mundanes — as though with the passage of years he might eventually lose interest in finding her. _You should have known me better than that, Duchess, _he thought grimly.

But the start of the trail lay in Nº362, Rue St. Honoré. Turning on his heel, he strode towards the door, a dark gleam in his eyes his wife would have instantly recognized, the alert, coiled look of the hunter whose quarry has at last broken cover. His mind on street clothes, and the ticklish discretion of French shop assistants, it took him a minute to take in what the other man was saying.

Stopping dead, he swung around slowly, one hand on the back of a chair.

"Say that again," he said, and there was no humour in his voice whatsoever.

"I said," Blackwell repeated conversationally, "that it's funny the way they're all suddenly popping up again after all these years. Because I saw Lucian Graymark day before yesterday, crossing Second Avenue. Must be sunspot activity or something."

For a moment incredulous fury darkened his vision, rising up behind his eyes in sheets of black fire, and he had to draw a hard-held breath before he could speak, fingers gripped on the delicate wood of the Louis Quattorze chair.

"Did he see you?" he said at last, in a voice edged like razor wire.

The intensity of the relief that washed over him as Blackwell shook his head took him by surprise. He found that the hands closed round the chair back were shaking with anger.

"I don't see how he could have," Blackwell's imbecile grin widened, "as I was thirty feet above him in the air at the time. In the Roosevelt Island tram," he elaborated painstakingly, "just descending into Manhattan." He gave a slight shudder. "I hate that thing, gives me the heebie jeebies: dangling in mid-air like a damn circus act — but I suppose you wouldn't understand that," he said, shrugging. "Anyway, I was concentrating on keeping my eyes on the ground — looking at a lovely Ford Thunderbird waiting for the light, if you must know — and suddenly there was Lucian in the crosswalk, heading east on 60th."

"You're certain it was Lucian?" The words rapped out like a fistful of gravel flung against a window almost before Blackwell finished speaking.

But he had no real doubt what the answer would be. His presentiment had not misled him, he was sure of it: after all these years of searching for her in vain, she was within his grasp at last — so long as Blackwell's folly hadn't wrecked everything.

But not, it seemed, Paris after all. New York, of all improbable places—

"Oh it was definitely that bastard Graymark." Blackwell gave an unpleasant laugh. "Looking shabbier than ever. His hair's greyer — I guess running around on all fours ages you pretty fast — but it was the same terrible cut, and he's still got those weedy wire-rimmed glasses. Anyway, I'd know his damn mongrel face anywhere, the dirty traitorous—" and he used a word that would have shocked Mme Bizalion if the walls hadn't been good, thick, eighteenth-century plaster.

"And you didn't see fit to mention this to me earlier?" His voice cut like a whip across Blackwell's epithets. Beneath his ribs, his heart had begun to beat a slow, fierce rhythm in time to the refrain echoing in his head: _New York, New York, New York..._

Blackwell was staring at him stupidly, obstinate bafflement plain on his purple face. "It didn't seem like a big deal," he protested. "We've always known it was a possibility the bastard was still alive. I'd say by the look of it, he's lying low. Looked like a mundane. Anyway, I don't see how he can possibly be a danger to us. We've got the Lightwoods and their damn Institute sitting less than forty blocks uptown from us; if you're not worried about that, I don't know why you're getting worked up about a lone werewolf somewhere among the eight million inhabitants of New York."

"Of course Lucian's not a danger," he said furiously, and watched the Shadowhunter take a reflexive step backwards at the cold savagery of his tone in spite of the half a globe separating them. "He's a _lead, _you self-satisfied, unpardonable fool. _The_ lead, the first cast-iron break in fifteen years of hunting for the Angel's Cup—" He broke off, the breath coming hard in his chest. "You had Lucian Graymark in your sights, in broad daylight. _And you lost him._" With a violent effort, he suppressed the urge to walk straight through the scrying glass he'd opened up and wrap his fingers around the Shadowhunter's neck.

"Well I couldn't help it." Blackwell's tone was defensive. "By the time we'd descended to the station, he was gone. What do you expect me to do — leap out of the tram car in midair like a flying squirrel? Apart from anything else, they're sealed, you know, Valentine."

"Oh by the Angel and all the hosts of Heaven—" he hissed through gritted teeth. "I expect you to use your head. You have a stele, I presume. Even in the scrap heap that passes for the interior of your skull there most be the lineaments of a simple _Sequor_ rune lingering somewhere."

"Well I didn't think of it. Anyway, you don't even know it would have worked on him. He's not exactly a Shadowhunter any more. I promise you, Valentine," he added, voice thick with loathing, "I want to get my hands on that bastard as badly as you do."

His thick fingers were closed into fists, an almost greedy hatred brightening his eyes, and Valentine felt a trickle of weary distaste seeping through the banked fury inside his chest.

Letting go of the chair, he made his way carefully back towards the window until he was standing a foot away from the paned glass, his hands clasped gently behind his back. Blackwell eyed him uneasily, a glimmer of fear dawning in his eyes at last.

Valentine looked at him for a long moment, and his voice when he spoke was like pressed ice, words dropping like pebbles into the stillness.

"If you can contrive for a moment to rise above your squalid personal resentments and recall the reason you were sent to New York in the first place—" His eyes swept the Shadowhunter contemptuously, and he saw the other man swallow. "This isn't about vengeance — not at the moment at any rate," he added softly. "It's about the Mortal Cup.

"Or had you forgotten that?" His voice was dangerously quiet.

"Well, I don't know what makes you think Lucian has got your precious Cup." Blackwell's tone was sulky. "Whatever you may think of her, I don't believe even Jocelyn would turn over the Angel's Cup to a Downworlder."

For a second, a flare of pure anger fled like summer lightning through his veins. _What_ _I may think of my wife is my business and none of yours — or anyone else's. _But aloud he only said shortly, "Of course Jocelyn hasn't given the Cup to anyone."

"Then what's Lucian got to do with it?"

"Because she is with him, you fool," he shouted, his control shattering at last like a dropped glass exploding against a stone floor, and saw the other man blink in surprise. "Do you suppose that Lucian is in the city alone? They're together, have been together for years."

Of course they were: it was obvious. How could he ever have believed anything else? Because — he supposed — as the years went by without a whisper of news, he had allowed himself to believe that Lucian must surely be dead: precisely the sort of tomfool, inexcusable wishful thinking he had no patience for. There was no reason to suppose Lucian was any more dead than he was; less, if it came to that. There had never been any report — rumours even — of Lucian's death; and his information about Downworld was excellent, he'd made sure of that. The werewolf had simply disappeared from the face of the earth.

_Just like Jocelyn. _Rage and grief raked his heart with poisoned talons. He supposed he'd always known it, really. The pain of it took his breath away, dark and savage as the Mark burning on his arm — and not one iota less self-inflicted.

Blackwell was still staring at him, fascination warring visibly with the wariness on his face. "And _that's_ not personal," he muttered under his breath. "All right," he added hurriedly, seeing the look on Valentine's face. "You figure that if Lucian is in New York, Jocelyn is there somewhere too. And the Mortal Cup." He shrugged, a shade of scepticism entering his voice.

"You don't even know she's still got the Cup, Valentine. Maybe she hid it somewhere in Idris. Or threw it into the East River. It could be half way to Staten Island by now, ten feet deep in the muck at the bottom of New York Harbor."

"Trust me, she won't have gotten rid of it." He had himself in hand again, all traces smoothed from his voice and expression of the choking black tide pouring like cold poison through his breast.

"And you think you can get her to tell you where it is? The bitch would die rather than help you, Valentine. If you ask me, she'd probably die just for the pleasure of spiting you."

"Oh, she'll tell me where she put the Cup." He smiled, a slow, dangerous smile. He could handle Jocelyn, of that he had no doubt, always could. He had allowed her once to catch him out — fatally — because he was distracted, absorbed, with the callowness of youth, in his own urgent preoccupations. And, he supposed, he had underestimated, and even misunderstood her. He would never make that mistake again.

His smile hardened, fingers closing around the cool silver of the medallion nestled in his pocket, lost for so long and now back once more in his possession.

"I just have to find her."

As if in reply to his words, a light knock sounded discreetly from the door in the adjoining room. Mme Bizalion come for the breakfast tray — it must be later than he realised. With a rapid flick of his stele, he restored the sunlit view to the room's long, paned windows. By the time she reached the inner door, the concierge would find only the foreign gentleman gazing pensively out at the sultry August morning.

A few seconds more and the link to New York would disintegrate completely, but for the moment, he knew, he could still be heard by the man on the far side of the sparkling panes of glass. When he spoke now, there was nothing in his voice but crisp efficiency: hard and bright as a seraph blade.

"I think we've said all that needs to be said. I have a few matters to finish up here, but I'll be with you by tomorrow. Leave the Portal unbarred at your end. In the meantime, I would suggest you apply yourself to finding Lucian, fast. My tolerance for incompetence is not infinitely elastic. Try the werewolf community again. I know Maurice did due diligence on the city's Downworld this spring, but look more closely. There may have been some contact there."

There was a slim chance, he thought with resignation, that with Pangborn's help, Blackwell might succeed even now in catching up with Lucian, though he didn't hold out great hopes.

But the truth was, if the trail ran cold it didn't matter. He was confident of his own powers. Now he knew where to look, it was only a matter of time until he ran the werewolf to ground.

_I've got you now, Duchess,_ he thought, a small, cold flame of exultation springing up in his chest as he latched the window shut and swung round to give Mme Bizalion his greetings. He could feel his heartbeat, strong and steady as a bell tolling its slow, implacable note for the dead.

What Lucian might have found to do in that hard-edged, brilliant, cosmopolitan city he couldn't begin to imagine: neither the skulking Downworlder, nor the quiet, steady, down-to-earth provincial boy he had once been. But of one thing he was certain: where Lucian was to be found, there he would find his wife.

.

_Cantab_  
><em>January 2015<em>

.


End file.
